Monthly Archives: September 2017

This is the Interlaced Heron bookmark from Celtic Needlepoint by Alice Starmore. I picked this book up at one of the big library book sales and am glad I did; there are several designs I’d like to work in it. It called for 22-mesh single thread canvas; I didn’t feel like tracking that down, so I worked it in half cross stitch on some 22-count fabric I had. It’s charted for Kreinik Soie d’Alger silk floss with DMC equivalents; I used the DMC equivalents except for the gold. It called for DMC 3046, which wasn’t a very bright gold, so I substituted DMC 728. I looked up the Kreinik color (2212) and probably would have wanted to substitute something else for that if I’d gone that route.

I kind of wish I’d gone for more strands or full cross stitches or something for the background; I’m not entirely happy with the coverage. I ended up scanning the chart which gave me something to mark (I was OK until I hit the first neck) and which also gave me more ability to distinguish between the different colors on the chart. It’s a color chart, and there are three very close colors on the chart (the two reds and the orange). I used a flash picture for the first wing and the scan for the second. I worked this in hand and it ended up a little warped, but I don’t care enough to do anything about it; it’s just a bookmark.

This is the first project I’ve done with Delica beads; I enjoyed working with them and the way they look. I had very few problems with this. I do have a few cases where the thread went over the beads instead of through them; mostly I didn’t notice until it was too late to do anything about it. The only real problem I had was with the chart itself. The details said the bracelet was 6 1/2 inches long; as charted, it was more like 7 1/4 (over 8 including the toggle and loop). The instructions said to remove rows at the beginning if you wanted a shorter bracelet, and the picture reflected a shorter bracelet than the chart. I don’t have a good feel for the length of rows of beads, so I didn’t want to start lower than the chart. I didn’t want to remove rows at the end because I didn’t want to have to figure out another way to do the loop. The chart for the toggle had no relation to the chart or the picture; I just copied the last row of the bracelet into the toggle, which is what the toggle in the picture had. It’s a little longer than I like my bracelets, but overall I’m happy with the way it turned out.